Canonical needs to devote more developers, time and resources to Kubuntu

[umberstark]

Canonicals efforts to spruce up Gnome is akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

Ditch Gnome and make KDE the primary desktop enviroment, imo.

[phrostbyte]

From when I [rarely] deal with the Ubuntu developers, they generally seem swamped. There is definitely some kind of extreme shortage of them. So no I do not think Gnome should lose developers - it needs all it can get. There is no real easy solution to this problem, unfortunately.

[Penguin Guy]

I think most people looking at it objectively would agree that KDE is presently more advanced in terms of overall desktop suite integration, and customization and system configuration capabilities

Only a KDE fanboy would come to that conclusion. The general consensus is that KDE 4 is a buggy pos and a memory hog. Also I don't see the relevance to this forum.

Actually I hate KDE, but I completely agree. There's no doubt that KDE's better than GNOME, but I also find KDE more complicated.

[Khakilang]

Are you serious? What you're describing is the current status quo. Kubuntu is a second-class citizen, and the KDE packages are maintained by a very small group of developers.

If there is shortage of manpower and only if. Which would they choose? KDE or Gnome?

[autumnraine]

I think telling privately funded companies what they should do is an exercise in futility, especially when there are far more viable and realistic alternatives for accomplishing what you want, such as strengthening the community of contributors to Kubuntu (that they are merely sponsoring, and they haven't committed to anything beyond that) by becoming part of it, and encouraging others to do so.

On a more general note (read: don't take this personally), I'm saddened by the widespread trend of people resorting to "Canonical should do more" at the sign of every shortcoming of Ubuntu, instead of thinking of what they can do themselves to fix or amend the issues they're encountering through community participation. If we're going to end up asking a specific company to "do more", or do the specific things that we think they should do every time we're dissatisfied with some aspect of free software, as if we were at their mercy, instead of seeing how we can fix it ourselves, we might as well be using proprietary software.

Here are two long-time Kubuntu developers who aren't, about the "Canonical should..." thing:

http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2010/...is-not-ubuntu/
http://blog.nixternal.com/2009.09.26...step-children/

Interesting links, thanks . However when I said "Canonical should" I meant, as I explained in the original post, that it would be in Canonical's own best interest to do so. It is a company whose product is selling commercial support for its own distributions, and so it makes sound business sense to not just concede a large percentage of your potential clientèle (KDE users) to your rival competitors. Hence my suggestions are no less legitimate than what you'd read in the op-eds of a financial magazine, for instance.

I too appreciate that the heart of Linux is the DIY spirit and community participation of its users, but the facts remain that a) most users do not have the time or acquired knowledge to contribute heavily to the development of a distribution, and so b) the fundamental development work for any distribution sponsored by a company will be mostly done by paid developers.

Ubuntu also prides itself on being a beginner-friendly distro that welcomes people with no Linux experience and little interest in knowing about the subsurface workings of a Linux desktop - that's one of its main target markets for paid support. Since it offers commercial support for Kubuntu, it makes no sense to then produce a less-than-stellar distro that it will have to struggle to support.

Quote:
Originally Posted by autumnraine
Not entirely, the KDE-minimal package still installs many Kubuntu customizations

Namely?

The packages are compiled and configured by the Kubuntu team, and if you install KDE-minimal in Ubuntu and then log in to the KDE, you'll see a desktop that is little different than what you end up with installing from the main Kubuntu Live CD - same theme, panel configuration, etc.

Ubuntu was the main running distro with Kubuntu coming later as an after thought...Kubuntu was not first in the food chain.

This may have been how it started, but that's immaterial to the Ubuntu family's present priorities. One of its main 'selling points' is that it comes with such a diverse variety of pre-configured desktop environments, several of which - Kubuntu, Xubuntu, UNR, probably Lubuntu in the near future - Canonical wishes to sell support for (it explicitly says so on their websites). Hence it doesn't make sense even from a business perspective to produce less-than-stellar distributions if your bread and butter is to offer commercial support for them.

[bigbrovar]

You are very right in every aspect kubuntu can not be compared to ubuntu in term of features and attention ubuntu gets from canonical. The way i see it this has its pros and cons. On one hand, it means kubuntu misses out on most of the coolness and general awesomeness that canonical have developed for ubuntu. things like ubuntuone integration,music store, app center, guest session, new artwork etc. on the other hand it means less attention from canonical also means less imposition of ideas on the kubuntu community. When you look at the recent buttongate issue where canonical simply used its veto against users wishes to move the window buttons to the left. and how more and more the ubuntu distro is been shaped as an open source OSX implementation a move which many user aren't comfortable with. you will see that canonical's neglect of kubuntu is actually one of kubuntu's strength IMHO.

when i look at the two scenarios I think I would like the status quo to remain as is. if we can learn anything from canonical's ubuntu relationship.. he who plays the piper dictate the tunes. we may not have all the man power ubuntu gets. But we have something better. Kubuntu is a community distro independent of canonical and as a community we should look less and less to canonical for help and support but ask yourself what can i do to help? How can I help make kubuntu better. Things like artwork, filing bugs, code contribution etc would go along way. Even raising awareness, documentations blogging, helping out new users They are tons of ways every kubuntu user can help out make kubuntu a better product. Kubuntu choose to stick with kde vanilla hence any improvement to kubuntu is more likely to be accepted by kde upstream which means your improvements reaches out to more then just the *buntu crowd.

In conclusion I would defo appreciate more hands working on kubuntu. But if that would result in the project being hijacked from the community the way canonical hijacked ubuntu. then I think I would pass. we are much more better off to DIY as a community. IMHO

[NightwishFan]

I have always found Kubuntu satisfactory. It just does not really focus on branding in kde4 as much as it did on kde3 is all.

[autumnraine]

You are very right in every aspect kubuntu can not be compared to ubuntu in term of features and attention ubuntu gets from canonical. The way i see it this has its pros and cons. On one hand, it means kubuntu misses out on most of the coolness and general awesomeness that canonical have developed for ubuntu. things like ubuntuone integration,music store, app center, guest session, new artwork etc. on the other hand it means less attention from canonical also means less imposition of ideas on the kubuntu community. When you look at the recent buttongate issue where canonical simply used its veto against users wishes to move the window buttons to the left. and how more and more the ubuntu distro is been shaped as an open source OSX implementation a move which many user aren't comfortable with. you will see that canonical's neglect of kubuntu is actually one of kubuntu's strength IMHO.

when i look at the two scenarios I think I would like the status quo to remain as is. if we can learn anything from canonical's ubuntu relationship.. he who plays the piper dictate the tunes. we may not have all the man power ubuntu gets. But we have something better. Kubuntu is a community distro independent of canonical and as a community we should look less and less to canonical for help and support but ask yourself what can i do to help? How can I help make kubuntu better. Things like artwork, filing bugs, code contribution etc would go along way. Even raising awareness, documentations blogging, helping out new users They are tons of ways every kubuntu user can help out make kubuntu a better product. Kubuntu choose to stick with kde vanilla hence any improvement to kubuntu is more likely to be accepted by kde upstream which means your improvements reaches out to more then just the *buntu crowd.

In conclusion I would defo appreciate more hands working on kubuntu. But if that would result in the project being hijacked from the community the way canonical hijacked ubuntu. then I think I would pass. we are much more better off to DIY as a community. IMHO

For the most part I definitely agree. However there are some things none but the most advanced users can do, such as compile a working implementation of Phonon's integration with Pulseaudio (as Mandriva and Fedora now do). For this we mostly rely on the ability of our development team to write good code (read: have the time to write good code), or are at the mercy of wise Jedi-superusers' benevolence, which is severely limited by the fact that most such people have other demanding day jobs. Users should contribute in every way possible and shoulder most of the load for artwork, helping people in the forums, etc. But for the really big stuff we need professional developers. IMO anyway FWIW.

[bigbrovar]

For the most part I definitely agree. However there are some things none but the most advanced users can do, such as compile a working implementation of Phonon's integration with Pulseaudio (as Mandriva and Fedora now do). For this we mostly rely on the ability of our development team to write good code (read: have the time to write good code), or are at the mercy of wise Jedi-superusers' benevolence, which is severely limited by the fact that most such people have other demanding day jobs. Users should contribute in every way possible and shoulder most of the load for artwork, helping people in the forums, etc. But for the really big stuff we need professional developers. IMO anyway FWIW.

You seem to under estimate the power of the community. Again I am not against cooperate sponsorship. what I am against is cooperate control against the spirit and wishes of the community. From the look of things the more people from canonical we have working on kubuntu. The less the influence the community would have on Kubuntu. The community is very powerful and some of the biggest contributors to kubuntu are not even employed by canonical. Take http://identi.ca/nixternal he is one of the biggest contributors to kubuntu he helped out with kubuntu plymouth theme and many other things with kubuntu yet he is not a canonical employee. we have distros like debian, archlinux etc which are completely community sponsored distros and yet Debian is one of the most stable linux distros out there. Community doesn't not mean unprofessional. Again it would be nice to have people paid to work on kubuntu. But if it would be at the cost of community control then i think we are better off as we are believe me. You dont even have to be a uber geek to help out. There are lots of little areas (artwork, documentations) which kubuntu can benefit from. Things like pulse integration with kde is being worked on upstream and the kubuntu developers i spoke too said it was decided by the community that Lucid should be left as is (being LTS and all) the move to pulse audio can be worked on with Lucid +

[praveesh]

Please see the web page : http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2010/...is-not-ubuntu/ . It says why kUbuntu is not recieving much love from canonical .